Ethan Zuckerman from World Changing had a chance to talk to Nicholas Negroponte recently about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Ethan’s report sheds some light on this attempt to build a laptop computer cheaply and ruggedly enough for students in developing nations.
The 1-to-1 project in my own school district has shown me the value of “one laptop per child.” I’ll watch this project with great interest.
Scott Roiger and I gave our presentation on the Hopkins 1-to-1 computing project this morning. I think it went pretty well and we were fortunate to get a mixer installed in our room so that we could record the session. This may be the first session ever podcast from a T+L2 conference.
Download: STP-NSBA-1to1 (26.9 MB, 58:31)
Tim Lauer couldn’t make it, but that didn’t stop Steve, Will, and me from recording another episode of Ed Tech Coast to Coast Tuesday night.
Our conversation centered mostly on the topic of access to technology and how full-time access changes the teaching and learning environment. Will’s school just launched a tablet PC project for teachers, and we’re in the second year of a 1-to-1 project with 600 elementary students and their teachers. We’ve both found that if teachers let it happen, 1-to-1 environments can change the day to day work of teaching and learning dramatically.
Are we approaching a day when not providing a computing device to each and every student constitutes educational malpractice? A laptop changes nothing by itself, of course, without a well-trained teacher to create and facilitate learning activities that exploit the technology. At least if you send the technology home with the students they can explore things on their own regardless of what goes on at school.
Download: ETC2C-20050922 (19.5 MB, 42:32)
The ADE group that was working on the research around one-to-one learning has started a blog, 1 To 1 Learning, describing the database they designed to track research articles.
I’ve consistently said since I started my current job nearly two years ago that the era of one-size-fits-all professional development needs to end. It may have been appropriate to put 25 teachers in a computer lab for a training program in the early days when none of them had much educational technology experience, but that certainly isn’t the case anymore. Let’s take a theoretical example of a training session with those 25 teachers with the goal to teach them how to manage digital pictures with iPhoto. Of those 25, one-third will never has used iPhoto or a maybe even a digital camera, one-third will have enough experience with the tools to recognize that they would like to learn more, and one-third will be experience digital photographers who have 2,000 photos in their iPhoto library and could probably teach the class. No matter what group you target in the training, two-thirds of the group will go home frustrated because it went over their heads or bored because it was too basic.
This principle was reinforced to me throughout the professional development program for our one-to-one computing project. We did some training early on and it was obvious that the sessions were operating at too high a level for a substantial number of the teachers in the group. (Yes, we had actual tears from at least two participants.) Nothing like making a teacher cry to bring home the importance of this issue. We improved our training program substantially and by the end of the year we were offering much smaller training “electives” that teachers could choose from to help ensure that they were getting the material at an appropriate level. A mentoring model is an obvious next step, and I plan to work on that this year.
The final principle that I discovered was that teachers (and everyone else by extension) can only learn when they’re ready to hear what is being taught. It’s of little use to teach iPhoto to someone who’s never taken a digital picture. Ever tried teaching people about blogs who aren’t regular blog readers? They may enjoy the training, but the chance that they will begin blogging seriously themselves is practically zero. When I get questions from teachers about some bit of technology that they were trained on a few weeks or months earlier, it’s obvious that they didn’t learn it the first time because they weren’t ready to hear it.
This “just in time” element is evident in my thinking about our curriculum sharing tool. I’m convinced that the system won’t be used to its utmost unless the district’s teachers get timely suggestions of resources that they can use right away. Talking to someone about a technology tool that they might use in a few months isn’t effective. You need to get the information to them when the curriculum is already on their minds.
One of the software purchases I made for next year was a BrainPOP subscription for all of the district’s 3rd-6th graders. I had a number of our teachers in the one-to-one computing project work with it on a trial basis and they raved about how much the kids enjoyed the BrainPOP content. They’ve got movies and quizzes in science, social studies, math, English, health, and technology topics. One tiny little feature that I appreciate is that they allow “deep linking” to specific movies. That allows the teacher to link directly to a particular movie and avoid potential confusion as young students try to navigate through the various categories. Take this movie about MP3s, for example.
One tip: I wouldn’t bother buying a subscription for your K-2 students. I haven’t found much content appropriate for kids that age. If you ask, the BrainPOP folks will sell you a subscription that doesn’t include that group and you’ll save some money.
I talked for about 30 minutes today to a group of 130 people about our Hopkins one-to-one project and the broader issue of relating to today’s digital kids. It was an energetic crowd and I had great time. Awareness of blogs and other Internet technologies is all over the map here in North Dakota, just like everywhere else.
I had the pleasure of meeting Craig Nansen face to face today. Craig, a fellow Ed-Tech Insider, is a pillar of ed tech leadership here in North Dakota. He’s got eight people working on technology integration in his district of 7,000 students. That’s an impressive level of commitment to staff development!
I’m doing a “nuts and bolts” talk about our one-to-one tomorrow and hope to have time to catch some sessions too. I’ll post all the good stuff here.
Terri Osland, my colleague at Hopkins High School, discovered a handy application that will find a place on our one-to-one laptops next fall. ImageWell is a tiny little program, but it has a bunch of handy features:
Drag images in and out of the well, resize, crop, shape, rotate and add a watermark, border, or drop shadow. No need to launch multiple applications to add text, labels, arrows, circles and squares to your image. Add a thought cloud or talking balloon. A few simple clicks, copy, paste, and send them off to your web server instantly. At the click of a button the image is sent and a handy URL is copied to the clipboard. Just like that, it doesn’t get any easier!
The software only works on Mac OS X. It’s free, but not open source.